Still Life
by Sirikit
Summary: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen: Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order.
1. Susan

**title**: Still/Life  
**author**: Sirikit  
**rating**: K  
**summary**: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).  
**a/n**: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.

_We share our mothers' health  
It is what we've been dealt?  
What's in it for me?  
Fine; then I'll agree_

* * *

**  
I. Susan**. 

She walks without idleness, in that tall, straight manner of well-brought-up girls. She will never be pretty, but there's something about her face that inspires attention, a quality of seriousness that, for the rest of her life, will lead people to assume that she is older than she is. Her features owe more to her father's side of the family, and she knows she has the Bones face: the quizzical eyes, the angular jaw, the hair in that indifferent shade between brown and red. In the mirror, she sees pleasant regularity.

(Her father sees differently; he sees his brother in her smile, and the ghost of his sister in her frankness.)

Sometimes she feels -- not depressed, but -- _immobile_, rooted in place by her good family and her good friends and her own good nature. But she cannot unmake her own essentials; she can't flirt with the wrong boy or dye her hair or ever risk anything of great value because she understands, to the marrow, how much has already been lost.

(She walks forward with her head held high.)


	2. Hannah

**title**: Still/Life  
**author**: Sirikit  
**rating**: K  
**summary**: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).  
**a/n**: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.

_We share our mothers' health  
It is what we've been dealt?  
What's in it for me?  
Fine; then I'll agree_

* * *

**  
II. Hannah**. 

She is obsessed with details and has the habit of persistent tidiness. She leaves things better than she found them because that's what she was taught, that is what her house stands for, and Hannah always was a girl who did what she was told.

She isn't clever enough to be philosophical but she believes that life, when it becomes impossible, must be handled at the smallest level. When Justin is Petrified, when Cedric is killed, when her mother leaves for the chemist's and never comes back, Hannah descends from reality into the world of little things, where everything can be orderly and neat if she wants it to be. She folds her pastel jumpers, her black-and-yellow socks; she stacks her notebooks and the loose sheets of parchment. She considers the smooth round edges of her nails, and copies and re-copies her Potions essay until every slant of her handwriting is flawless.

And all this without magic; she has Muggle enough in her to want to do some work _honestly._ She was taught this by her mother.


	3. Zacharias

**title**: Still/Life  
**author**: Sirikit  
**rating**: K  
**summary**: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).  
**a/n**: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.

_We share our mothers' health  
It is what we've been dealt?  
What's in it for me?  
Fine; then I'll agree_

* * *

_**  
**_

** III. Zacharias**.

The first thing that Zacharias does after the war is stop talking to everyone.

He doesn't visit and he returns all owls unopened; he avoids all familiar places and all proper functions. Zacharias doesn't mean to do it like this, but that is how it happens anyway. He ran, after all; he ran and clambered away and did not fight. (Later he tells himself it wasn't cowardice but rather _self-preservation_, which has a better sound.) But even in his head he can't bring himself to shake Ernie's hand or to look Hannah in the eye. He doesn't think about Justin and he doesn't think about Susan, especially not Susan. In his nightmares she speaks for all his friends and the generosity in her voice is awful, irrevocable; it reaches past the remnants of his bravado and leaves him anchorless.

He wants to be righteous again, to be himself again as he was _before:_ a Hufflepuff, a pureblood, a loyal friend, a hard worker, a good son. But this is _after,_ and now Zacharias is just another eighteen-year-old boy who survived the war, already a proven coward.


	4. Justin

**title**: Still/Life  
**author**: Sirikit  
**rating**: K  
**summary**: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).  
**a/n**: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.

_We share our mothers' health  
It is what we've been dealt?  
What's in it for me?  
Fine; then I'll agree_

* * *

**  
IV. Justin**

Justin still has his days when he feels like a trespasser, like a changeling that they'd swapped for some other kid who had the right to cook up potions and fly on brooms. He has to think to himself: _no_, it isn't just a stick I'm carrying about in my sleeve, and _yes_, it's perfectly normal for people to wear pointy hats, and _of course_, many of his friends don't know that a microwave is not, in fact, a weapon of mass destruction.

He doesn't mean to sound flippant; Justin is aware of how serious it can get, aware to an extent that he still hears the papery hiss of the basilisk in his dreams. But sometimes it rings like a great farce, this whole obsession about blood, prophecies, and Dark Lords. He remembers being eight years old and watching cartoons about this exact sort of thing, remembers stories about heroes and villains and impossible odds. Did he even like those stories? Of course he did, but he's not sure he ever wanted to live in one.

He doesn't want to tell this to anyone for fear of sounding ungrateful, because as a son of privilege he knows that game: the descendants of dukes and the sons of MPs aren't allowed to complain because people just don't want to hear it -- and anyway, neither does Justin, not even from himself. He couldn't bear it if his friends found out that, sometimes, he misses living in a more ordinary world.


	5. Ernie

**title**: Still/Life  
**author**: Sirikit  
**rating**: K  
**summary**: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).  
**a/n**: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.

_We share our mothers' health  
It is what we've been dealt?  
What's in it for me?  
Fine; then I'll agree_

* * *

**  
V. Ernie**

He was born fussy, was fussy as a child, grew up to become a fussy young man. Along with this fussiness Ernie has kept the baby-like roundness of his face, the large-eyed stare. He often wonders if this is why people never seem to take him seriously. After all, at school he got called everything from _swot_ to _insufferable twat_ and a number of other very rude things besides. No one calls him that anymore, not to his face, but Ernie hears the implications all the same, slid between the commonplaces and generalities of his new adult life.

(Ernie tries not to mind, though it's hard. He reminds himself that disdain is the price he has to pay for the privilege of giving people good advice. He is sure they will thank him later.)

But he suspects there is a formula that he hasn't quite yet grasped, some quality of empathy that he hasn't yet perfected. In the topography of Ernie's concerns he has classified this as a Problem To Be Solved, category_ Person/Personality_, where it exists alongside similar goals such as 'perfect your handshake - it makes a difference', 'be inspirational!', and 'learn to dance in a way that doesn't look like you were bitten by a bowtruckle in the arse.'

(The devil is in the details, or so he's heard, and he spends his time in pursuit of trivialities.)

It takes him years to realize that he is more than a little bit ridiculous. Too many years, maybe, because in the end he thinks it might have been the reason he lost Hannah.


End file.
